I'm Back! And Where Did Summer Go?

Snow Sonata cosmos (and spider friend)

I simply can't believe it's been two months since I last blogged - that's ridiculous! All I can say is that I have been super busy, way more than usual. In the meantime, the hellish weather has passed (although we're still in a severe drought) and a new leaf has turned over, so to speak, in the garden. Take for instance, this one little cosmos plant. I had no luck this year getting cosmos from seed to grow. True, we had no rain but I do have a sprinkler! I planted three packages of various types of cosmos seed and got very few plants. This white one was the only survivor of its package and it never bloomed until this month. If I had been lucky with this plant, a whole bed of them would have looked sublime. And speaking of sprinklers ...

Near the white cosmos I planted some iris transplants and then set up a sprinkler to settle them in. The next day I had an explosion of different types of mushrooms. It's amazing what a little water will do!

A mushroom eruption

The squirrels are driving me crazy with their digging. The photo below shows why I can't plant bulbs right now.

pesky squirrels' damage

I have a lot of open areas in the bed I put in last fall since the plants haven't filled in yet, and the squirrels really like that. So last weekend I started making rodent proof guards for the bulbs I'm going to plant. I cut chicken coop wire into sections and fasten them on top of the soil with landscape pins. Then I cover them with mulch. It's some trouble but worth it.

Agave desmettiana bloom stalk

And here's a fall surprise - a bloom stalk on my agave. Since this photo was taken, the stalk has doubled in height. I do hope the blooms open before a hard freeze. But I guess the plant will die after blooming, and I'm OK with that since this agave has been too tender for me, and thus a hassle to protect.

Mariachi, jalapeno, and maybe some small Gypsy peppers

Fall has brought a bumper crop of peppers. Last spring I got carried away with all the pepper varieties The Natural Gardener had, and I came home with five pepper plants and not really enough space to plant them. So I crammed them all into one area and now have a strange mix of slightly hot sweet peppers and truly hot, hot peppers. The Mariachi pepper, which is supposed to be only mildly hot, causes my husband's eyes to water. If you know him, that's saying a whole lot (the man can finish a jar of ghost pepper salsa in two days all by himself).

'Tiburon' poblanos

Last weekend I picked a bunch of poblanos, roasted the whole lot and froze half of them. I find the easiest way to roast them is to throw them on the grill.

'Helvola' miniature water lilies

I'm glad I took this photo of my little pond a couple weeks ago because the water lilies are now slowly putting themselves into winter hibernation. In the stock tank pond I have a blue rush, miniature 'Helvola' water lilies that Pam of Digging gave me, and my sweet little glass floatie ball I brought back from my Seattle trip.

Lindheimer's muhly grass, Muhlenbergia lindheimeri

And at last, one of my favorite things about fall is when the grasses start to bloom. I have quite a few blooming now: 'Northwind' switchgrass, pennisetum, 'White Cloud' muhly (which I must get a photo of to show you), pink muhly, and this muhly grass commonly called Lindheimer's muhly. Here it's not quite in full bloom. It's fairly big - about 4 by 4 feet. I love it.

pink muhly

And how could I not show a photo of the pink muhly? It looks so luscious, like a frothy ice cream treat.

I hope never to be so tardy with my blog posts. See how an entire season faded away and another appeared in just these past two months?

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2011. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.

Foliage Follow-Up to Bloom Day

Pam at Digging has a new meme going that celebrates foliage and other non-blooming natural things around the yard, the day after Carol's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. While photographing my yard for blooms (my Bloom Day post is here), I had great fun in photographing the many interesting textures and colors in the garden. I think this might be the last hurrah for my 'Bloodgood' Japanese Maple above, but a nice hurrah it is.



I wish I had thought to put something at the base of this pine tree so you could tell how massive it is. When I hug this tree (yes, I do that occasionally), I can't get my arms all the way around. I wish I knew the variety of pine it is (might be Short Leaf pine since it has very short needles).



This time of year is when the ‘Silver Shower’, Ophiopogon jaburan, a type of mondo grass, starts putting on new growth. Seems a strange time for it but that's what it does. I have several of these in mostly shade.



The foxtail ferns (Asparagus meyeri I think) are in large pots nestled against the house. I'm too scared to leave them out exposed where I normally have them most of the year. I probably don't have to worry though. They're very hardy.



The texture on my ‘Felt Plant’, Kalanchoe beharensis, is like velvet. Although this photo is towards the top of the plant, the older leaves show more bumps on their undersides.



I like the way my red oak is still determined to hang on to some of its chlorophyll.



Moving to a more ancient form of vascular plant, we have Horsetail Rush, Equisetum hyemale. (It's ancient because it reproduces by spores, not seeds.) This is in a pot in my little water fountain. So far I haven't had to protect it from freezing yet.



I really don't mean for this to be a botany lesson but now I seem to have moved to non-vascular plants like this moss (the black stuff is mold, green stuff is moss). This appears during the rainier seasons on our chimney.



And now I've moved to lichens, which according to Wikipedia is "a symbiotic association of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga (commonly Trebouxia) or cyanobacterium (commonly Nostoc)". Plus a little moss thrown in on the rock for good measure.



More lichens and rock. The only native rock around here is something called "iron ore", so these rocks come from Arkansas. Makes me feel a bit guilty that they're not native but iron ore is usually small, rusty, and hard to work with.



I guess I'll end my impromptu romp through the plant kingdom with a fungus, some type of big mushroom.

Be sure to check out the links to other Foliage Follow-up posts at Pam's (and my Bloom Day post if you haven't seen it yet)!

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2009. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.

"Picture This" Photo Contest

The folks at Gardening Gone Wild have their monthly photo contest going. This time the theme is "Down on Your Knees", a great theme in order to challenge us to go at our garden photography from a different angle. David Perry is the judge this time and if you've never seen his blog, you really must. It's inspiring and many times educational.

I almost didn't enter this contest after I looked at a few of the entries. Besides some great garden blogger entries, there's now photography blogger entries, so my entry is going to pale in comparison. But I thought it worth putting this photo up anyway because I'd love to know the variety of mushroom (seems I always have to label things). Anyone know?

We've had some rain recently and these little beauties are starting to pop up here and there. To get this shot I borrowed a tip I learned from Saxon Holt - lay out a yoga mat and lie down. I risked chiggers and even more mosquito bites than I already have but I found it was quite fun hanging out at that level!

New for fall

Fall is the time of year most Southern gardeners yearn for (check out any Southern gardener's Blotanical Favorites for confirmation of that). Just like Northern gardeners who yearn for Spring because of the many barren winter months, we yearn for fall to get relief from the burdensome summer heat (which starts in "spring" of course!). Fall is a great time for planting here. Roots can start to plump out and the plant won't have to endure heat (though sometimes lack of rain can be a problem). We get the last hurrah of the roses and other flowers, like the sasanqua, are starting to come into their time of glory. So normally I start a new season of planting at this time. However, this time it's mainly my friends who have done that. That's because most of my effort so far has been in giving them my seedlings and other plants that need dividing. So they're busy planting everything I've managed to give away - good for them and good for our town! I love passing along plants.

I have managed to plant one new thing - the lovely hydrangea at the top of this post. It's "Mini Penny Hydrangea" (H. macrophylla). I usually prefer the lacecap hydrangeas to the mopheads like this. But we don't get a lot of variety at the nurseries in my small town this time of year. And since I really wanted a hydrangea for this one spot, I chose this one. What I'm excited about is that it's relatively compact, growing to just 3 to 4 feet high and wide. We'll see!

I also snagged a buddleia for me because of my never ending quest for more butterflies. It's supposed to be a Nanho Purple Butterfly Bush but I think it was mislabeled (it came from a big box store, what can you expect). The other reason I bought it is because it is a standard and I don't have a lot of room for how big these normally get. I had planned to plant it in front of the rock wall but I think I like it better there when it's in a pot. It clears the top of the wall instead of competing with it. So it's temporarily sitting there, waiting for a decision from the head gardener (me, of course).

Also new for fall is this lovely fungi. They're growing all over the back on rotting stumps. It's interesting because I normally associate mushrooms with rain but we haven't had any rain since the hurricanes. Pretty, isn't it?

More rain-inspired finds

What fun to go exploring for what August rains have brought! I prefer not to remember or take pictures of the fire ant mounds or the weeds (one of which was almost 3 ft tall!). So here's some neat little things I did find.

Some lovely mushrooms for a start. Long ago I took a botany class by an eminent mycology prof who drilled into us NEVER to eat wild mushrooms unless we really, really knew what we were doing. So I haven't bothered to learn the names of fungi. I just marvel at their beauty and tenacity. I just missed photographing some yellow ones but they were in their death throws and not very appetizing.

I was terribly excited to find many little buds on my potted Meyer lemon tree. I can't wait for the fragrance and the bee orgy!

And to my surprise, my husband found a little wisteria blooming in our alleyway. The wisteria in our neck of the woods has really gotten out of hand. Both my husband and I have spent countless hours trying to rip out the wild wisteria. It sets seed everywhere and especially loves the prepared planting beds. We've managed to get a decent handle on it now but it's a constant maintenance situation. So to help prevent this little one from setting seed, I happily clipped it for the house. The rose in the vase with it is 'Janet' (see my last post on that topic).

Not to jinx anything, but some sunshine would be nice soon. :-)